Bligh, William. A Voyage to the South Sea… (1792)

A Voyage to the South Sea, undertaken by Command of His Majesty, for the purpose of conveying the Bread-fruit Tree to the West Indies, in His Majesty’s Ship the Bounty… including an account of the mutiny on board the said ship, and the subsequent voyage of part of the Crew, in the Ship’s Boat, from Tofoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch settlement in the East Indies.

First edition. This is a handsome and notably large copy of this classic, one of the great voyage accounts of all time: the official narrative by William Bligh of the voyage of the Bounty. This is the full account of the voyage, and includes a slightly altered version of Bligh's description of the mutiny and the open-boat voyage which had been rushed into print separately two years earlier. At the time of this publication Bligh was on his second breadfruit voyage, and the work was edited by James Burney with the assistance of Sir Joseph Banks.

The open-boat voyage, one of the most famous feats of seamanship of all time, was also notable for the coastal discoveries made almost accidentally in the course of the desperate voyage. Bligh’s description here is accompanied by his important engraved chart of discoveries made on the coast of present-day Queensland. His achievement in charting large sections of the coast under conditions of terrible hardship partly completed the work of Cook himself on the Australian east coast.